Medium Trip '07, Part VI: The Des Moines
TV/FM Towers

Over the course of 2007, your editor set foot in 20 of our
50 states, visiting broadcast facilities all along the way. And
now that the season of travel has ended, it's time to settle
back and begin recapping some of what we saw as we criscrossed
this land of ours.

This week, we continue our recap of what we'll call "Medium
Trip 2007," a 10-day family journey that began and ended
in Chicago, taking in much of Iowa and a little of eastern Nebraska
along the way, and in the process revisiting for the first time
some of the territory from our original
Big Trip back in 2001.

When we left off in our last
installment, we were heading back into Des Moines after visiting
the transmitter site of WHO (1040), one of those heritage Class
I-A 50,000-watt nondirectional signals that we enjoy visiting
so much. (We made it to a few others this year, too - stay tuned
to future episodes of Site of the Week to see WBBM and KSL!)

What do we enjoy seeing almost as much as a good 50,000-watt
clear channel AM? Something even rarer - a cluster of 2,000-foot
TV and FM towers. By their nature, these beasts are seen only
in limited parts of the country - air-traffic restrictions and
station power limitations keep them out of the crowded northeast,
and there's no need for them in the mountain west, where nature
has provided much higher vantage points for antennas than mere
guyed steel can ever accomplish.

But then there's the big, flat, open terrain of the midwest,
where land is readily available, stations are widely spaced,
and the stations of Des Moines (to use a handy example) need
to cover a 70-mile radius to serve everything that falls within
their market.

So it was that we found ourselves, 'round about lunchtime,
about a dozen miles north of Des Moines and a couple of miles
west of I-35, in the fields surrounding the farm town of Alleman,
Iowa, looking way up at the four big towers that form
a cluster a little more than a mile from north to south.

Go searching for information about these towers online and
you'll find a lot of material put up by fans (mostly Europeans)
of tall structures in general, using names like "Hearst-Argyle
Tower" or "WOI-Tower" that nobody uses in real
life.

From left to right (south to north in the photo above, taken
just off exit 96 of I-35), we'll refer to these four as the "KSTZ
Tower," the "KCCI Tower," the "Analog Tower"
and the "Digital Tower" as we explore their histories.
Come along, won't you?

It's only in a cluster like this that a 1479-foot tower can
look small, but that's the case with the KSTZ tower, which is
rather underpopulated for a tall tower these days. This stick
went up in 1983, when independent station KCBR (Channel 17) signed
on here, reactivating the UHF channel that had been used way
back in 1953 by Des Moines' first TV station, the long-defunct
KGTV. KCBR changed calls to KDSM a few years after it signed
on, becoming a Fox affiliate, and remained on this tower until
2002, when it moved a mile north to the new digital tower, about
which we'll say much more in a bit.

In
the meantime, the tower had acquired a tenant, KRNQ (102.5),
a full class C outlet that was a former sister station to channel
8, the erstwhile KRNT-TV. KRNQ became KSTZ ("Star")
in 1993, and when KDSM vacated the tower in 2002, it sold the
structure to Saga, which by then owned the FM station. And that's
why this very tall tower has nothing whatsoever at its top, and
only a big 14-bay FM antenna on the side for KSTZ.

Back to channel 8, though: when a consortium of Des Moines'
TV stations built the very first tall tower up here in the early
seventies, KRNT-TV was the lone holdout. The signal advantage
that those stations had over KRNT-TV's 633' tower in downtown
Des Moines was immediately apparent, though, and so channel 8
bought land next door to the original tall tower and put up a
1999' tower of its own in 1974. (That same year, the station
changed calls to its current KCCI; it eventually moved from its
old studio site to a new one a few blocks away, replacing the
633' tower with a new 500' auxiliary tower, still crowned with
the weather beacon light that had become a landmark on the original
tower.)

Having its own tower proved to be something of a strategic
advantage: when digital TV came along, KCCI had plenty of tower
space of its own for a new digital antenna, and today the KCCI
tower is crowned with a stacked antenna for digital channel 31
and analog channel 8. It will remain on channel 8 after 2009,
and presumably the stacked antenna will eventually be replaced
with a single-channel antenna for 8. KCCI is now owned by Hearst-Argyle,
and that's why some references (we're looking at you,
Wikipedia)
call this the "Des Moines Hearst-Argyle Television Tower
Alleman."

Call it what you will, this tower sits about 1000 feet west
of the first tall tower to be built up here in Alleman. In 1972,
a consortium made up of NBC affiliate WHO-TV (Channel 13), ABC
affiliate WOI-TV (Channel 5) and public broadcaster KDIN (Channel
11) built this 1999-foot tower in an attempt to solve a whole
set of signal problems.

WHO-TV was, as we noted in last week's installment, transmitting
from the top of the WHO(AM) tower in Mitchellville, 20 miles
southeast of Des Moines, which was a fine spot for an AM station
but less than ideal for a TV station that needed to reach not
only Des Moines but also Ames, 30 miles to the north, not to
mention a whole bunch of smaller communities such as Marshalltown,
30 miles east of Ames, and Fort Dodge, 30 miles or so northwest
of Ames. (Fort Dodge briefly had a local commercial station of
its own, KVFD-TV 21, but it failed and was donated to Iowa Public
TV - and my, aren't we digressing now?)

WOI-TV, a commercial station licensed to Ames and operated
by Iowa State University, was transmitting from the WOI(AM) tower
on the ISU experimental farm south of Ames, which was just fine
for viewers in Ames but not at all satisfactory for Des Moines
viewers, never mind the big swath of the market that extends
60 miles south from Des Moines to the Missouri border.

And KDIN was on a relatively short self-supporter in downtown
Des Moines, which was just fine for Des Moines viewers but not
much help for people out of town in any direction.

The Alleman site equalized matters considerably: from 2000
feet in the air at this spot, the stations were able to put city-grade
signals (and then some) over Des Moines and Ames, and reception
improved considerably in much of central Iowa. The new tower
improved FM reception, too: public radio WOI-FM (90.1 Ames) moved
here from the AM tower in Ames, while WHO's sister FM station,
KLYF (100.3), moved here from the WHO(AM) tower in Mitchellville.

(Oh yeah - the European mast fanatics have a name for this
one, too - they call it either the "WOI-Tower" or the
"NYT Broadcast Holdings Tower," notwithstanding that
WOI was never the sole owner of the tower, and that WHO-TV, which
now owns it, is no longer owned by NYT Broadcast Holdings; it
- and the tower - now belong to Randy Michaels' Local TV, LLC.)

The current antenna configuration here looks like this: a
combined antenna on the top for channels 11 and 13, with a panel
antenna just below for channel 5. A few sections below that is
the 10-bay WOI-FM antenna.

So what about all the DTVs, not to mention the other FM, on
100.3? Those all went to the newest, and northernmost, of these
towers. At only 1998' (a mere 609.3 meters, compared to the lofty
609.6 meters of the KCCI and WOI/KDIN/WHO analog towers), it's
apparently not quite tall enough (or perhaps just too new) to
capture the attention of the Europeans, so it doesn't get a fancy
name. It's owned by American Towers, and we'll simply call it
the "digital tower."

When we were last up this way in 2001, construction on the
new tower was just wrapping up. Over the next few years, it would
pick up plenty of tenants: the DTV counterparts of the original
tower's occupants - WOI-DT (59), KDIN-DT (50) and WHO-DT (19),
as well as a new analog station, WB affiliate KPWB (Channel 23,
now CW affiliate KCWI) and later a new DTV-only station, My Network
affiliate KDMI-DT (Channel 56). In addition, as we noted up top,
KDSM (Channel 17) moved its analog signal here in 2002 and put
KDSM-DT (Channel 16) on from this site.

There's one radio station here, too: the 100.3 that used to
be KLYF is now KDRB, "The Bus," with an 8-bay antenna
that gives it 100 kW/1795' and a whomping class C signal all
over the region.

What happens here after 2009? We're not quite sure. WOI has
to vacate its out-of-core digital channel, as does KDMI - and
neither KDMI nor KCWI have paired companion channels. (KDMI-DT
broadcasts standard-def digital programming for both KDMI and
KCWI right now.) KDIN and WHO are returning to their VHF channels
in 2009, and WOI plans to use channel 5 for WOI-DT. It's a good
bet that KDIN-DT and WHO-TV will go back to the channel 11/13
antenna on the old "analog tower" - WHO-TV owns the
stick, after all. Will WOI-DT return to its channel 5 antenna
there, too? KDSM-DT (remaining on 16) and KCWI-DT (flash-cutting
on 23) are pretty sure to stay at the new tower, as will KDMI-DT
on the channel 31 it's inheriting from KCCI-DT in a negotiated
channel election.

In next week's installment, we head north and east to Waterloo,
home of another prominent 50 kW AM signal (and some more really
tall towers, too.) In the meantime, you guessed it: you can hear
legal IDs from WOI-FM, KDRB and plenty of other Des Moines signals
as well, next Wednesday at our sister site, Tophour.com.

Thanks to Greg Gade and Raleigh Rubenking for the
tours!

Tower Site Calendar 2008 is here! Visit the Fybush.com
Store now and get your calendar now!